Hard floor surfaces are desired in many instances for durability and maintenance. Floors in high traffic areas must clean easily and withstand years of wear without losing their aesthetic appearance.
Recently, it has become apparent that hard floor surfaces, although easy to maintain and able to withstand heavy traffic are potentially slippery, especially when soiled or wet. This is a particularly critical problem for floors in areas around doorways and kitchens and bathrooms where a potential for wetness and soiling, including oil and grease, occurs.
It is well known to increase a floor's slip resistance by making the surface abrasive. This has been done, for example by adding sand to paint when painting concrete or the like. This is thought to help remedy a slippery floor surface since the surface coefficient of friction (COF) of sand is higher than that for paint. However, when the sand is mixed with the paint, the paint coats the sand thus reducing its (COF). To maintain an exposed surface of the sand, the sand can be broadcast on wet paint. This type of surface does not stand up to heavy traffic and may not be acceptable aesthetically, however. Further, these methods may be suitable for remedying a slippery exterior floor surface, such as concrete, but for interior floor surfaces that withstand heavy traffic, painting the floor with a grit containing paint is neither an effective nor an aesthetic solution to the slipperiness problem.
As an alternative to adding sand to paint, for example, it has been proposed to add glass spheres to a surface adhesive film, as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,676,208 to Griffin. According to this patent, an epoxy type of resin having many minuscule solid spheres such as glass beads contained therein is coated on the surface of a walkway to increase its slip resistance.
The prior art attempts to coat the surface of walkways to increase its slip resistance are disadvantageous from a practical view point in that the character of the surface of the floor is permanently changed as a result. Coating the surface of the floor also leads to a maintenance and floor care problem in that the surface of the floor is made to be abrasive and therefore difficult to clean. In particular, the more abrasive the surface of the floor is made for slip resistance, the more abrasive the floor is on cleaning equipment. Therefore, although slip, trip, and fall accidents continue to be a serious problem, there has been little interest in changing existing floor surfaces by applying coatings directly on the floor.